Learning and Labeling

Abstract

Clark and Karmiloff-Smith (CKS) have written an extraordinarily valuable paper, which sympathetically addresses what has all too often been an acrimonious and ideology-ridden "debate" and begins to transform it into a multi-perspective research program. By articulating the submerged hunches on both sides in a single framework, and adding some powerful new ideas of their own, they dispel much of the smoke of battle. What we can now see much more clearly is the need for a model of a brain/mind that, as they say, "enriches itself from within by re-representing the knowledge that it has already represented."